Pass me the Alka Seltzer. Last week’s news glut left me hung over. I feel like unless I can report on Harry Potter texting he-whom-we-are-all-sick-to-death-of on his Apple iPhone, what can I possibly have to say?

But at some point we have to get back to real life.

So here’s a virtual cool compress for your forehead in the form of some news you may have missed because of last week’s SunRocket wipe-out and Harry Potter and the Deathless Hype.

Last week UK firm Communic8 launched its Emporia Life mobile handset for elderly people, with user-friendly features like extra large buttons and display, super-loud volume (including the ringer), and a big red pre-programmable emergency button. BBC News story reports that retailers are snubbing the gizmo and are being accused of “ageism” by advocates for the elderly.

AT&T’s endorsement of openness for the 700MHz spectrum that will open up when analog TV goes away shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s a shrewd move for AT&T to tell Google in effect “put up or shut up.”

AT&T has been in the communications and consumer service business for more than a century. Google’s in the…search engine and advertising business. OK, they bought Grand Central. Forwarding calls doesn’t make Google a phone company. Whatever you feel about “Ma Bell,” give them credit for understanding the mandates of the voice communications business.

Kevin McLaughlin of CMP Channel offers insight into how another software behemoth is doing in the telecom business. Microsoft’s small business phone system, Response Point, evidently left VARs at a Microsoft Partner Conference less than enthusiastic. One described it as “semi-functional.”

The IPTV smorgasboard peeking over the horizon may be the oncoming train of an out-of-bandwidth Internet backbone. Wes Thompson of TVtechnology.com offers analysis.

Mobile email is the next big cash cow for service providers and network operators, according to joint report by open source software company Funabol and Frost & Sullivan.

Industry analyst Infonetics has a bouquet of free whitepapers including ones on indoor cell phone coverage and the evolution of VoIP over wireless LAN in the enterprise.
http://www.infonetics.com/services/green.shtml?whitepapers/whitepapers.shtml

Picking up the SunRocket pieces: VoIPVoIP is offering a BYOD pay-as-you-go deal for SunRocket refugees.

Patent Trolling: Rates Technology is now suing Qwest over VoIP patents. The Long Island company already has Vonage, Nortel, and Google feathers in its troll cap.

I can’t close without a Harry Potter comment. So here goes: Philip Pullman’s trilogy — His Dark Marterials, the first book of which, The Golden Compass, appeared contemporaneously with the first Potter book — is far more complex and compelling than Rowling’s septet. And it ends before your interest in it does.

Loren Baker, the editor of the respected Search Engine Journal, is convinced the short-lived item on the official Google blog that purported to announce the cancellation of the Google-eBay “click-to-call” partnership is a hoax.

We’re very much inclined to agree.

Baker writes that “such a message would not come from Google blasting eBay, nor would it be full of misspellings, unsigned or end with the ‘This message has been translated using Google language tools’ line.”

The item in question was deleted from the blog less than an hour after it appeared (you can see a screen shot of the item here). And it is inconceivable that such an announcement would be made in a poorly written blog post that calls the month-old agreement “monopolistic.”

So was the Google blog hacked? It sure looks like it may have been.

Ironically, the blog item posted before the “click-to-call” cancellation note, entitled “Our Security Stance” and posted by Heather Adkins of Gooogle’s security team, asserts that “Google takes security very seriously and designs all of its services and applications to protect your privacy and data security.”

“We keep the bad guys out of our systems,” wrote Adkins.

Well, not all the “bad guys.” Chinese government censors seem to have free rein. And so do, apparently, “monopoly”-bashers.

[ADDED AFTER ORIGINAL POST]

Om Malik, the journalist/blogger (whose work, thankfully, tilts more to the left part of that slash) at GigaOm writes that Google has confirmed the post to be a hoax.

According to the spokesperson who contacted Malik, “A bug in Blogger enabled an unauthorized user to make a fake post on the Google Blog claiming that we have discontinued our AdWords click-to-call test. The bug was fixed quickly and the post removed. Our click-to-call test is progressing on schedule and we are pleased with the results thus far.”

Has the Google-eBay click-to-call marriage come to an end? Already?

It may appear that way from a posting on the “Official Google Blog” (Official Google Blog) that appeared earlier today (Saturday) and quickly disappeared.

Ironically, a link to the post, entitled “Google Click-to-Call project cancelled,” continued to exist on the listing of “Recent Posts” on the blog on Saturday evening (as this item is written), though the link leads to an error page.

We managed to get a screen shot of the original post, which can be seen below.

Google Post

If true, this would imply that the “multi-year agreement to connect users, merchants, and advertisers around the globe” jointly announced by Google and eBay on Aug. 28th is off.

But there are serious questions about the veracity of the post. Though in its approach to business Google has been refreshingly progressive (if one can overlook the company’s regrettable decision to abide by the censorship demands of the Chinese dictatorship), it is difficult to believe that Google would back off an agreement barely 5 weeks later because it is a “monopolistic aproach that would damage small companies in the CRM area.”